Emerging Media to Digital Text Blog

Monthly Archives: February 2012

In the past few weeks we have expanded our class discussion about filters. We did a fun experiment in class, everyone Googled “God” and we all had similar as well as different results. I never really thought of personal filtering before. I knew sites like Netflix, Amazon, and Facebook ads did that but I didn’t think Google would! I went home that day and tried out the experiment with my boy friend and then my dad, they were also shocked at the fact that we got different results or the same results in different order.

Our next class was spent in our blog groups, fine-tuning our blogrolls. This was a bit of a challenge for my group. We all liked our own blogs and we wanted to use all of them. We talked it over and over and finally narrowed down our list to our favorite 10 sites/blogs. We later discussed that we might want to edit our list with different blogs that are directed toward a more specific group, a younger audience.

In class we talked about Organization within a blog and the visual design. For me this was a bit dull, it was common sense, but I know that my group members were new to this topic because they have never written a blog, they have never taking Design Basics, etc. So I didn’t learn anything new in those 2 classes.

I’ll admit I’m a bit concerned with our blog. I feel that we are trying something new, and we choose a topic that was doesn’t really have a set audience. I’m up for the challenge and so are my group members. It’s something I have never done, a group blog, and I know at the end it will be a good experience.

Since the last reflection blog, we have moved on to a new topic: Filter Failure and Crap Detection.

Continuing on from learning the difference between Broadcasting vs Blogging. Our class discussion moved to “filter failure.” We watched Clay Shirky’s discussion on Web 2.0 Expo about It’s Not Information Overload, It’s Filter Failure. In this video clip he explained how we are getting this overload of spam, junk, crap, all because our filters have failed. We live in a world were everyone had some kind of ’21st century ritual’ when checking their email, using spam folders along with manual filters to clean out the junk before reading the important content. In class we talked about some ways/solution to help with the spam overload, not just with email, but with social media sites as well.

We moved onto reading 3 short articles talking about RSS (Real Simple Syndication) as well Aggregation Tools, and how we have to convenience our present brain to see the positives of our future brain. We discussed in class the visual organization, channel coverage, and compartmentalization tools that can help keep all the information you want to stay up to-date on in an orderly, organized, manageable place. After learning what a RSS Feed is, I was still a little intimidated about what it can do. I still see it as another thing to keep track of and to keep organized. Personally I really don’t have a use for it, because I don’t follow multiple sites on a regular basis. Readings:Mindful Infotention by Howard Rheingold, Practical 101S: Google Reader and Persistent Search by Dave Fleet, and Screen Shots: How I Use RSS To Track Thousands of News Sources Easily by Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Class topics moved on to Crap Detection, we read Crap Detection 101by Howard Rheingold, which talked about how to find credible sources with the help of search engines and manual detective work. In class we played a little game and found sites, with similar topics to our Group Blog Project, to test our skills at finding a sites that we credible. We looked for correct dates, lack of type0’s, credible sources within a article, if the people writing and/or people cited on the site were real and creditable, the amount of traffic flow through the site, and other ‘red-flags’ that popped up on a particular site.

Yesterday we had to read, Twitter Literacy by Howard Rheingold, which talked about Twitter, the uses of Twitter, how to use it, it’s differences compared to other sites, like Facebook, and so on. I personally love Twitter, I didn’t at 1st but I have grown to really appreciate all it’s worth. Our professor Dr. Famiglietti, gave us a wonderful idea and some tips to use Twitter as a search engine for out Group Blog topics, I’m a little bummed I didn’t think of it before. Because I’m the most Twitter savvy in my group, I am now in charge of finding credible sources for our blog though Twitter. I’m so excited; with in the last 10min of class I found lots of great information and people/organizations/companies to follow.